The Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge’s longevity is nearly as astounding as the story of its builder, Horace King, part black, part white, part Catawba Indian—a man so far ahead of his time that he wore a soul patch 60 years before anyone heard of jazz.

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It doesn’t much matter what I think about Superica and The El Felix, Ford Fry’s two new Tex-Mex restaurants with almost identical menus and almost identical lines. When I asked the manager of The El Felix—in Avalon, the Alpharetta mall-city—how many diners they served, he said, “Three to four hundred on a slow night.”

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Style & Substance

How to decorate with summer's happiest hues, a Swedish midsummer celebration, where to shop on the Westside, Nancy Braithwaite on Coco Chanel, luxe life on the lake, an essay from Mary Kay Andrews, and much more in the summer issue of Atlanta Magazine's HOME.

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Southbound magazine, the newest ancillary title from the publishers of Atlanta magazine, showcases the top travel destinations in the Southeast. We visit idyllic small towns and exciting cities in search of outstanding vacation opportunities.Inside Southbound

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Georgia offers diverse places to see and things to do, from the mountains in North Georgia to the coasts of Savannah and The Golden Isles. Take a tour in your own backyard and visit all that our great state has to offer. Begin your tour

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July 2015: Top Doctors

The list of doctors whom other doctors trust most. Plus, a roundtable of experts on the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease, and an Atlanta photographer documents his surgeon father’s struggle with dementia.

Report: Atlanta is the most sprawling big metro in the U.S.

A study released today by Smart Growth America looks at the impact of sprawl on healthy, safety, and economic opportunity

Metro Atlanta’s status as poster child for sprawl remains firmly in place. According to a report that will be released today by Smart Growth America, Atlanta is the most sprawling big metro region in the country (those over 1 million in population). The Measuring Sprawl 2014 study looked at 221 metro areas and 994 counties. Considering all metro areas, not just big ones, Atlanta rates second for sprawl, at 220 on the list. Congratulations, little Hickory, North Carolina: at 221, you can claim the title of overall sprawliest.

The study is a follow-up to Smart Growth’s 2001 influential study, Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact. For the new study, researchers dug even deeper into the correlation between development patterns and quality of life issues.

According to the research, people in more compact areas are healthier, safer, less likely to be obese, and have greater life expectancies. Simply put, people in more compact areas “live longer, healthier lives,” said Reid Ewing, the University of Utah researcher who directed the study.

Sprawl is often attributed to affordability. The thinking goes, people live further out from city centers because it’s cheaper. But when housing and transportation costs are combined, they represent a far greater burden for households in sprawling areas versus more compact ones.

The study also considered the connection between sprawl and economic mobility. People who live in high-sprawl metro areas have lower rates of economic opportunity than those who live in more densely developed cities. “A low income person in a compact area has much better access to jobs,” said Ewing.

To rank metro areas for sprawl, the researchers examined four major factors: development density; land-use mix; “activity centering,” or how clustered businesses, people, and services are; and “street accessibility,” which includes factors like short blocks, dense intersections, and street connectivity (i.e. fewer cul de sacs or dead-ends). Based on those factors, the researchers developed a sprawl index. Areas with indices above 100 are more compact, those that scored below 100 are more sprawling. Metro Atlanta’s index is 41. The New York/White Plains area, ranked most compact in the country, has an index of 203, while San Francisco’s index is 194.

The research was conducted by the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah. Smart Growth America is a coalition based in Washington D.C.

Most Compact Large Metros
New York
San Francisco
Miami
Santa Ana, California
Detroit

Large or small, the majority of sprawling cities are in the South, and the Southeast is the most sprawling region. “We don’t have a complete explanation,” said Ewing, who spoke with journalists on a conference call yesterday to preview the study. He said that the lack of geographic barriers for many Southeastern metro areas contributes to sprawl. “Atlanta can sprawl pretty much without limitation,” Ewing observed.